How Could Floyd Mayweather Possibly Bank $180 Million from This Fight?

In the third of a six-part series, GQ contributor _Will Leitch writes about the bout that’s been nearly six years in the making. _See his second column here.

One of the dirty secrets of the American cable industry as currently constructed is how much it’s ruled by sports. In a DVR world, sports are the one regularly scheduled program—leaving exceptions for award shows and terrifying live productions of Peter Pan—we all watch in real-time. I can experience everything else on television whenever I want; I"m sure Mad Men was great on Sunday, but I"ll get around to it whenever I have no better way to spend an hour this week, and when I do, I"ll have the luxury of speeding by the commercials. This is how we watch almost everything now—everything but sports. Sports are still, in the industry parlance, appointment television. You can record a sporting event and watch it later, sure, but only if you agree to abdicate any engagement with the rest of the planet in the meantime. Nobody talks about "spoiling" sporting events, because no one watches them later. They are urgent, and they are perpetual.

Because of this, the cable television industry—damaged by the nichification of American culture and our increasingly On Demand world—has kept itself alive through sports. Whether you enjoy sports or you don’t, whether or not you’ve ever attended a single game in your life, whether you even know where ESPN is on your viewing guide… no matter the case, if you have cable, you are giving the folks in Bristol a ton of money. Last year, according to The Wall Street Journal, the average cable subscriber paid ESPN — just ESPN -- $6.04 a month. The second-place channel, TNT, only costs $1.48 and a cable bill in total costs an average of $54.92 for basic service. That six bucks to ESPN is 40 percent of the going rate for HBO, but unlike ESPN, HBO is an opt-in service. With ESPN, whether you want it or not, you get "Monday Night Football," and the NCAA championship game, and the NBA Playoffs, and Sunday Night Baseball, and that weird Grantland show where Bill Simmons interviews Kobe Bryant about his hats. This six bucks a month—a number that’s expected to increase to $8.37 by 2018, and a number that doesn’t even include ESPN2, ESPNU, WatchESPN or any other Bristol network—is, according to some sources, more than the average American pays for child care, laundry, children’s clothing and movie theaters. ESPN absolutely rules not just the world of sports, but the world of television.

And yet: The $72 the average cable customer pays per year for ESPN alone, with all ESPN produces in return… that’s still 28 bucks less than it will cost to watch the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight in HD. The retail price (again, in HD, because you’re going to watch it in HD) is $99.95. To see one sporting event. A sporting event that could potentially be over within the first three minutes. It is the highest-priced PPV fight of all time by a whopping $25. If you buy it, you will spend more on that fight in May than you spend on electricity, telephone, or cable. It is 31 percent of the average American’s monthly food budget.

The widely assumed belief is that Mayweather-Pacquiao will be the most successful, in both money made (obviously) and actual number of purchases, in the history of the sport. According to ecutives within the industry, here are the five most-purchased PPVs in the history of boxing:

The fight on May 2, considered by some to be the last time we’ll see these legends ever fight (until the inevitable less-compelling, more expensive, rematch), is expected to fly past all those, even at that price. Which is leading to paydays that will make your eyes explode.

Pacquiao is expected to pocket $100 million for the fight, which would easily be the biggest boxing payday ever if it weren’t for the $180 million Mayweather is expected to net. $180 million! That’s more than LeBron James has earned his entire career. That is more than any player in the history of the NFL has made other than Peyton Manning. That is more than the value of every MLS team, and the GDPs of three countries. For one single fight, win or lose.

This contraction—and in some ways, the outright abandonment—of the PPV world is of course one of the main reasons this fight was delayed for so long in the first place. But rather than setting some sort of peak for the PPV world, in many ways, it’s a swan song for PPVs— in much the same way it’s a swan song for the two fighters who have benefitted from them for so long. While they will still benefit in the short-term (after all, these guys have mastered the art of eliminating middle-men and sucking up all the cash themselves; no one would pay this much just to watch the Williams sisters play each other, or Mike Trout hit off Clayton Kershaw), it will be difficult to escape the long-term trend. The fact is, boxing is less popular in the United States than it has ever been… and so are PPVs. We are an On Demand culture now, but we are also a pirating one, a much more open one where the notion of "closed-circuit" feels like something from a distant past. The reason the Mayweather and Pacquiao camps are pumping up the PPV buys are because all three of them, the bors and the format, are in their fading years, older relics watching as a changing populace with changing viewing habits move along without them. People will spend for this fight, because it takes something of this size and magnitude — Mayweather-Pacquiao! Finally! — for casual fans who don’t regularly follow boxing, UFC or wrestling to shell out the cash. But that’s an anomaly rather than a trend.

For all the money we’re spending in our cable bills, the amount of sports we have access to on a daily basis is staggering. The weekend of May 2, I can legitimately stream several NBA playoff games, multiple NHL playoff games, the NFL Draft, a Barclays Premier League game, and 30 Major League Baseball games, all at the same time, and all of it will cost me, combined, less than the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. We’ll all pay it this once, because this is a massive event … but probably just this once. This is the last gasp of an industry. The next superfight that doesn’t involve these two? You’ll be streaming it. You might not even realize you’re paying for it at all.

Will Leitch_ is a senior writer at Sports On Earth, culture writer for Bloomberg Politics, contributing editor at New York Magazine and the founder of Deadspin. He will be writing for GQ this month on the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight._